Optimizing the Shopping Cart: 12 Steps for Magento Users

T he shopping cart is the most important component of your e-commerce business. In order for your business to survive, your customers need to be able to make their way to the “Complete Order” button easily and quickly. Magento enables users to create user-friendly shopping carts, allowing you to maximize ROI. Here are the best practices for creating a streamlined checkout process with Magento:

  1. Provide checkout buttons at the bottom and top of your site.

Today’s Internet users are more distracted than ever, and one checkout button just isn’t enough. Place checkout buttons at both the top and bottom of your website. That way, customers can begin the checkout process Checkout-buttonsno matter where they happen to be on the page.

Checkout buttons should be in contrasting colors that catch users’ attention. As with most elements related to shopping carts, usability outweighs aesthetics.

  1. Allow customers to continue shopping

Some customers want to continue shopping after adding an item to the shopping cart, and you need to make it easy for them to do so. Shopping cart pages should include a visible “Continue Shopping” button.

  1. Product-DisplayProvide a related products display

By showing customers products related to the items already in the shopping cart, you can increase the average purchase order. There are extensions available for Magento that automatically display products that are frequently purchased together.

  1. Minimize the number of steps that customers must take to complete checkout

There’s a reason why Amazon has established a one-click buy feature. It’s an established fact in e-commerce that more steps to complete a purchase means fewer orders. While most e-commerce businesses cannot implement a one-click purchase feature like Amazon does, streamline the process so that buyers go through only one or two screens before finalizing their purchase.

  1. Implement proper authentication procedures

However, don’t skirt on authentication procedures. Trust is critical to any e-commerce business, and customers appreciate seeing that basic security measures are in place. A two-factor authentication system is industry standard.

  1. Don’t ask for the same information repeatedly

Entering in the same information more than once is tedious, so don’t make customers do it. This means, for example, that you should provide a checkbox for customers who have the same shipping and billing addresses (as most of them do).

Also consider which information is truly vital to collect. While it may be useful to know demographic information about your buyers for marketing purposes, requiring users to enter in too much information is a turn-off. In addition to being tedious, many e-commerce buyers worry about privacy issues and become suspicious when they are asked too much personal information.

  1. Give customers a variety of shipping optionsShipping

When you are able to offer customers more choices for shipping, you increase your business’ credibility. Again, look to Amazon as a model. For most purchases, users can choose from at least three different shipping options, from more expensive selections that allow quick receipt of purchase to more budget-friendly choices.

  1. Better yet, offer free shipping for large orders

Studies of e-commerce buyer behavior have repeatedly demonstrated that many customers balk when they discover high shipping fees. In order to remain competitive, more and more businesses are offering free shipping in order to offset the effects of shipping price shock.

Setting a minimum order price for free shipping is particularly effective because it incentivizes customers to buy more items.

  1. Show customers their savings

If you’re providing customers with savings via special deals or a rewards program, show them exactly how much they’re saving. Knowing this information will make them feel confident in the purchase and more likely to buy from you again.

  1. Allow customers to register for reward programs

The moment of checkout is your best opportunity to gain a long-term customer. Make sure that buyers have the option to register for your site while checking out—and make the process easy.
While many customers are wary of signing up for fear of being spammed, offering future deals and savings provides a strong incentive for registration.

  1. Let customers provide feedback at time of sale

feedbackEveryone appreciates being heard. Providing an optional comments box at time of purchase starts off the customer-seller relationship off on the right foot by letting buyers know that you care about their input.

  1. Use a shopping cart recovery system

Among e-commerce experts, it’s no secret that abandoned carts cut into profits. In 2015, the estimated cart abandonment rate was an astonishing 68%. Implementing a shopping cart recovery system helps businesses to gain back some of this lost business. Sending friendly reminder e-mails to customers who didn’t complete the checkout process gains additional sales. If you can provide a discount to sweeten the deal, shopping cart reminders become all the more effective.

Optimizing the shopping cart is critical for the success of any e-commerce business. All of these tweaks can be made with Magento. Investing in expert-designed Magento extensions makes it easy to create a great checkout experience, thereby maximizing your ROI.

We hope you find these tips useful to enhance the checkout process of your Magento Store, until next time!


Shopping Cart Price Rules Extension Overview

Extendware’s Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules, you can create new promotions that are not possible in default Magento stores. With 24 different price rule actions, you will be able to create much more powerful promotions to attract customers to your store and products. For example, you can create rules like, “Buy a shirt and get a discount on a tie” or “Buy 2 of a product and receive the 3rd for free”. Why wait? Take action now and create much more powerful promotions to make your online business successful!


Offer Your Customers the Best Promotions and Products with Bulk Product Updating

Its a Sunny Day and you are stuck inside. Why? You are too busy  updating your prices, assigning categories and managing your catalog to enjoy the beautiful weather. Its tasks like these that allow us to lose valuable time that we could be spending doing fun things! Extendware’s Bulk Product Updating can update a series of prices, upsells, and manage products all with  a quick press of a few buttons. There are over 45 actions you can use, so you can have more time to enjoy the exciting things in life!

Here Are Some Other Great Features of The Bulk Product Updating Extension

Bulk-Product-Updating
Bulk Product Updating

Edit Prices / Special Prices / MSRP Prices / Cost Price
Set prices / special prices to a specific value or apply increases / decreases in the form of +10.5, -10.5, +20%, -20%. Flexible rounding rules (none, floor, ceiling, rounding) and the ability to add a value after the price modification (0.99, 0.50, etc) allow you to guarantee pricing such as $45.99 or $54.50. For example, you can increase all prices by 5%, round down (floor), and add 0.99 so prices are of the form $XX.99. This greatly reduces management time.

Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost
You can set the price relative to the cost and you can set the special price relative to cost or price. For example, set the price to be +20% of the cost and then set the special price to be -10% of the price. The possibilitie are endless!

Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost
Edit Prices Relative to Other Prices or Cost

Support for Custom Price Attributes 
If you have custom attributes with the decimal type you can enable it to be used for the bulk editing by simply selecting it in the graphical configuration.
Copy / Delete Tier / Group Prices 
Tier /group prices are very time consuming to create for every single product. Many times products have the same tier / group prices. Now you just need to define the tier prices you want for one product and then you can copy that tier / group price to any other products. This can save you hours and it is even fully compatible with Magento Tier Price Percentages.
Assign / Unassign / Copy Categories 
Simply select the products you wish to apply the action to and either select the category or input the list of category IDs you wish you assign / unassign / copy. Nothing could be easier.

Manage Related / Cross-Sell / Upsell Product Links
Create related, cross-sell, and upsell product links with ease. You may select between 3 different algorithms to create the links:
One-way – selected products are (un)linked to inputted product
Two-way – selected products are (un)linked to inputted product and vice-versa
Multi-way – all products are (un)linked to each other
Copy Custom Options
Creating the same custom options for every product is a very time consuming task. With Bulk Product Actions you can copy the custom options from one product to another. You can even choose whether you will replace any existing custom options or simply add to whatever custom options already exist.
Duplicate Products 
Easily duplicate multiple products so you can go in and edit their details later as you want.

Over 45 actions!
Over 45 actions!

Delete Products Directly From the Database
If you need to delete a lot of products and you know what you are doing, you can delete them directly from the database. This will not run the before / after delete code, which will save a LOT of time.
Change the Attribute Aet of Products
Change the attribute set of a product with ease. This means you no longer have to delete / re-create a product to change the attribute set
Have More Free Time to Spend on Income Generating Activities
This extension, especially when combined with Tier / Group Price Percentages, will save you countless hours of performing mundane and repetitive tasks. This extra time can be spent on income generating activities such as marketing.

Magento Bulk Product Updating – Tier / Group Price Support!

Managing Tier / Group prices is very time consuming task in Magento. For each product you must make several clicks of the mouse and potentially input dozens of numbers. If you need to change 100s of products, this could take you hours or even days. Magento Bulk Product Updating solves this by allowing you to copy tier / group prices from another product. The following tier / group price features are supported:

  • Copy – Copy the tier/ group price from one product to other products.
  • Delete – Delete the tier / group price from products.

Each of these features can be applied to an unlimited number of products. If you have 100 products that all have the same tier / group prices, then you can update all 100 at the same time!

Note: Tier / group price actions are fully compatible with Magento Tier / Group Price Percentages.